Tinkerbell takes over Disney on Ice

 If you catch me humming a few bars of “Under the Sea,” don’t think that I’m indulging in a “Little Mermaid” marathon during my lunch breaks.

No, it’s because CotB has a 4-year-old girl, and that means that Disney is everywhere in this blogger’s house. We’ve got Belle street chalk.
A Tinkerbell toothbrush stands tall in the upstairs bathroom.
Dress-up Disney Princess gowns show up in every room.
And decade-old McDonald’s toys (each discovered at local yard sales) are strewn about like caltrops.

So it’s no surprise that “Disney on Ice” is a yearly tradition.
Once again, the show has surfaced at the Giant Center at Hersheypark, and once again, CotB was there to clue you in on the good and bad of the show.

This is CotB’s third or fourth trip to Disney on Ice, so it’s fairly routine by now.
The show starts out with Mickey and Minnie Mouse offering to take us on a tour of the “Worlds of Fantasy.”
Their plans are cut short when their jalopy breaks down, and they call for help in the form of Tow Mater and his pals from Pixar’s “Cars.”
This cues the first big sequence of the night, as six miniature clown-cars and trucks wheel around the ice as they chat to one another.

The Disney on Ice folks say that the cars are fully animatronic, but the vehicle’s mouths barely move (I  actually wondered if they were broken), and if you peek through the windshields, you can see folks crammed inside and steering.
The “Cars” characters get moving around the skating rink, but hardly at a break-neck speed.
In fact, it’s more like Zamboni speed — slow, steady and very unlikely to win any race.

Once Mickey’s car gets fixed, the show continues with scenes from “A Little Mermaid,” which are remarkably polished, brilliantly colored and seems to fill the entire rink.
That’s not really surprising since it’s been a Disney on Ice standard for years now. They’ve probably got enough goofy fish costumes by now to hand them out as door prizes.

Following Ariel’s number, “The Lion King” slips on to the ice. All in all, it’s a fine piece as well, although there’s some gratuitous use of a fog machine during a wildebeest stampede, and I had to wonder why the cheetahs were wearing capes.
Maybe they were SuperCheetahs.

After an intermission, Tinkerbell takes center stage with a lengthy finale.
The sequence appears to be taken from the plot line of the recent straight-to-DVD Tinkerbell movie, and that’s its biggest flaw.
The movie is just too new — and far too obscure despite its yearlong carpet-bombing of merchandise at the nation’s stores — for it to be a suitable finale.
For an adult, the storyline is hard to follow, with its glowing power-axes and talk of “nature talent fairies.”
It’s got to be even more obtuse for a kid.

The Tinkerbell number would be just fine as an opening number, with the more familiar movie redos packed into the finale, but as is, it just becomes a messy anticlimax for the evening.

But those are just my criticisms.
My 4-year-old? She loved it, and that’s who really matters.